February 2012
45 posts
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Something
it was the unexpectedness of our music the way the stars withdrew when i walked you to the subway the city hissed in time
Gary Percesepe
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I GIVE YOU A ROOM, YOU WILL MAKE OF IT SOMETHING
It’s a mail slot for delivering messages to your doppelganger. It’s a portal to another dimension in which you and everyone you know are made of balsa wood and held together with glue. It is not so far from the truth. It is a wound in the heart of the building. It is a window. It is your level self. It is a wormhole. Stay back; it is not a...
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The Artist
Why do you subdue yourself in golds and purples? Why do you dim yourself with folded silks? Do you not see that I can buy brocades in any draper’s shop, And that I am choked in the twilight of all these colors. How pale you would be, and startling— How quiet; But your curves would spring upward Like a clear jet of flung water, You would quiver like a shot-up spray of water,...
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A Love Song
What have I to say to you When we shall meet? Yet— I lie here thinking of you.
The stain of love Is upon the world. Yellow, yellow, yellow, It eats into the leaves, Smears with saffron The horned branches that lean Heavily Against a smooth purple sky.
There is no light— Only a honey-thick stain That drips from leaf to leaf And limb to limb Spoiling the colours Of the whole world.
I...
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Mozart in E-flat Major
I turn around. I feel Monday’s well-shaven face lightly caress my left shoulder
most cherished part most crucial here and now
HSIA YÜ, ranslated by Karen An-Hwei Lee
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Armadillo
Deep in the unlit palm scrub, a rustling wedded to the ground and me with my sorry light searching. Armadillo, half blind, not yet stupid with fear, tough- skinned like my heart which whispers through its sack at the sight of you: I am feeling small and unlikely myself. This is about what I cannot know. It’s about you, who are beautiful, and a god if...
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Snowed In
Tyrone lies beside her in bed reading Tolstoy, in trouble again with the church despite being dead one hundred years. Anna’s back curves like the half moon of winter. Tyrone watches with stupid tears as she places her clear fingernails lightly beneath his ache as if she were touching an altar of driftwood.
Gary Percesepe
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“”
– Going the Distance
At the long bar of smoke and dark whiskey, voices grinding into splinters. Men who build their lives on steel, on rubber, on things and the making of things line the bar, huge as boulders, a stonehenge of backs, necks, forearms, knuckles roughened raw, the wide...
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The Cucumber
The snow is knee-deep in the courtyard and still coming down hard: it hasn’t let up all morning. We’re in the kitchen. On the table, on the oilcloth, spring — on the table there’s a very tender young cucumber, pebbly and fresh as a daisy. We’re sitting around the table staring at it. It softly lights up our faces, and...
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Ecstasy and the Redbird Always, the first day I burn, the sun and the beloved already evident in my unprotected blush. A redbird works so hard to unwind the dead moonflower vine from the fence for her nest, but she might have to give up. Take a strand already broken, fallen, or a thin twig, brown stem, scrap of a previous season. She and I are nothing alike, except in this: pale red coloring,...
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Catch What You Can
The thing to do is try for that sweet skin One gets by staying deep inside a thing. The image that I have is that of fruit— The stone within the plum or some such pith As keeps the slender sphere both firm and sound.
Stay with me, mountain flowers I saw And battering moth against a wind-dark rock, Stay with me till you build me all around The honey and the clove I thought to...
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Dear P. XXIII
The sun sends its wires of heat onto your face, stops on your cheek, coiling into a present tense of red. I am a hungry bird that murmurs love, that murmurs more. When I see red, it is not blood or war. It is not the spur on the point of fish hooks. The red here is a tributary towards you. It is a ruby of lunar impact. A stone of sixty sides. I want to drink the ruddy rust, taste...
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Account The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes. Some would be devoted to acting against consciousness, Like the flight of a moth which, had it known, Would have tended nevertheless toward the candle’s flame. Others would deal with ways to silence anxiety, The little whisper which, though it is a warning, is ignored. I would deal separately with satisfaction and pride, The...
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Translations
You show me the poems of some woman my age, or younger translated from your language
Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow enough to let me know she’s a woman of my time
obsessed
with Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls baked it like bread in our ovens worn it like lead on our ankles watched it through binoculars as if it were a helicopter bringing food to...
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To the Angelbeast
All that glitters isn’t music.
Once, hidden in tall grass, I tossed fistfuls of dirt into the air: doe after doe of leaping.
You said it was nothing but a trick of the light. Gold curves. Gold scarves.
Am I not your animal?
You’d wait in the orchard for hours to watch a deer break from the shadows.
You said it was like lifting a cello out of its black case.
Eduardo C....
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What a mouth will do
Kiss the impossible hope that love will last. An end to looking as if for one glove. Swallow the sweet lust of fruit—one way a body can be pleased. Tell others why. Tell others nothing. Feel the tongue and how goodness and mercy can flow like a river from the north or how it can rage as only rage can and know there isn’t much to say after that.
Betsy...
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Hearts
There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. ~ Leonard Cohen
There were times through the years, love, I thought my heart would break, times it felt rough around the edges and since I wear it out there, melting on my sleeve, you always knew, while your heart was (mostly) tucked away, steadfast and quiet, though once I saw it...
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A Hundred Ways To Say Your Name I avoid speaking your name in conversation, throwing it to the air as if it were nothing more than an assumption of you; it is my last mode of defence. The last item of clothing to discard before I realise I’m naked in public. Because they can hear it in my voice. I know. Even in that one short syllable that means everything and nothing; your name is as common as...
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A Little Love Poem Someone who hates scrabble. Someone who sleeps on her back near an open window in winter, her breath rolling like a river into night. Someone who wants me to wake her in the morning by reading ee cummings’ love poems, giving a small candle-flicker of a smile just before opening her eyes. Someone who appreciates the architecture of churches, but refuses to step inside....
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Discovery of a Young Woman
The morning’s dull departure, in the doorway
By the hinge, a woman coolly peered in
I noticed then: a strand of her hair was grey
And could no longer resolve that I was going.
Silently I stroked her breasts, she asked
Why I, a bedtime guest, did not take leave
After a good night’s rest as was expected,
I looked at her quite bluntly and...
The Airman Wakes with His Lover Their eyes uncouple the night from bedspreads as the new day’s light filigrees their room. He said in his dream he was the only survivor aboard a shot-down bomber. Hers was nothing grand. Just one of starlings painted on the white ceiling above them.
Jeffrey Alfier
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When You Are Not Here When you are not here, the blanket is your skin, furred from touch, fragrant with sweat. The curtains tremble and shut like your eyes from a breeze of sleep. Distant thunder form words of denial banging on the lid of my mind. The evening sky stuttering on a threshold of night is an unthinkable moment of parting. Behind the cloud, a promise of peace glows...
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Reconcile
The earliest light we know
is out there on the hill this evening, calling to us. Starlight
is an ancient lilac, a talent for the fragile certainty:
there is a speck of memory. Then it is quiet.
It’s sacrilege to imagine
how someone should or should not have loved you, umpteenth time.
Sarah Vap
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Before
Before you were you, before your bicycle appeared under the street-lamp, before you met me at the airport in a corduroy jacket, before you agreed to hold my five ballpoint pens while I ran to play touch football, before your wet hair nearly touched the piano keys and in advance of how your raincoat was tightly cinched when you asked about nonviolent anti-war activity and before...
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Valentine
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light like the careful undressing of love.
Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief.
I am trying to be truthful.
Not a cute card or a kissogram.
I give you an onion. Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips, possessive...
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Only she who has breast-fed
Only she who has breast-fed knows how beautiful the ear is. Only they who have been breast-fed know the beauty of the clavicle. Only to humans the Creator has given the earlobe. The humans, through clavicles slightly resembling birds, entwined in caresses fly to the place at night where, rocking the cradle of cradles, the babe is wailing, where on a pillow of...
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Welcome Morning
There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning, in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning, . in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each morning, in the spoon and the chair that cry “hello there, Anne” each morning, in the godhead of the table that I...
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Nude Descending a Staircase
Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh, A gold of lemon, root and rind, She sifts in sunlight down the stairs With nothing on. Nor on her mind. We spy beneath the banister A constant thresh of thigh on thigh— Her lips imprint the swinging air That parts to let her parts go by. One-woman waterfall, she wears Her slow descent like a long cape And pausing, on the final stair...
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By Virtue of And
Honey given : Honey taken By virtue of and we divide and separate: branching into palo verde: green stick tree precipitating yellow blossoms: green tree, yellow blossoms: a mind sticks on certain images, certain colors: phone’s ringing interrupts: it’s the neighbor again she wishes: someone would do something about the bees: yellow...
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Aubade
I know my leaving in the breakfast table mess. Bowl spills into bowl: milk and bran, bread crust crumbled. You push me back into bed.
More “honey” and “baby.” Breath you tell my ear circles inside me, curls a damp wind and runs the circuit of my limbs. I interrogate the air,
smell Murphy’s Oil Soap, dog kibble. No rose. No patchouli swelter. And your mouth— sesame, olive....
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Diagnosis: Birds in the Blood
The hummingbird’s nervous embroidery through beach fog by our back
patio’s potato vine reminds me of my mother’s southern
drawl from the kitchen: She’s flying, flying like bird! I’ve heard that
as a child I involuntarily flapped my hands at my side during moments
of intense concentration. I’d flutter over a...
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A BOOKCASE IS NOT ENOUGH An opportunity to implement a new filing system, we store books in their logical places. Books about plants grow in the window. Books in the tub clean as effectively as water. The glossy covers of vegetables rainbow the crisper. Our manuscripts occupy our chairs at the dinner table. Eating is unnecessary if the author writes descriptively enough. Tonight we’re...
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Stray
On the beach, close to sunset, a dog runs toward us fast, agitated, perhaps feral, scrounging for anything he can eat. We pull the children close and let him pass.
Is there such a thing as a stray child? Simon asks. Like if a mother had a child from her body but then decided she wanted to be a different child’s mother, what would happen to that first child?
The dog finds a satisfying scrap...
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in spain
These points are fixed against terrain. Fragment. Ornament. Write evolution on a sheet of paper. Thin, pale as a robin’s egg. Say it’s all inevitable: The laundered dresses fluttering on lines. The window shedding its paint. Sugar dissolving in a glass of water. Place three fingers against my collarbone. Breathe. Tell me again how you lost the red notebook twice in other...
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Eight Ball
It was fifty cents a game beneath exhausted ceiling fans, the smoke’s old spiral. Hooded lights burned distant, dull. I was tired, but you insisted on one more, so I chalked the cue—the bored blue—broke, scratched. It was always possible for you to run the table, leave me nothing. But I recall the easy shot you missed, and then the way we both...
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Misgivings
“Perhaps you’ll tire of me,” muses my love, although she’s like a great city to me, or a park that finds new ways to wear each flounce of light and investiture of weather. Soil doesn’t tire of rain, I think, but I know what she fears: plans warp, planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away by floods. And worse than what we can’t control is what...
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The Test
Before we actually met, letters helped us shed the skins of rattlesnakes and wingless birds. Groping through old diaries — divorces lined on countertops like cups to wash — I wasn’t sure we had the hands. After a rose and that kiss — the kind that makes all loveless hours grow meat and juicy dreams — we settled on a...
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All Best
I go with the grain of foreign courtesies By writing, to somebody met only twice, I remain, your impassioned eternal lover Or My soul is yours each minute of day and night. Inevitably, a laughing answer comes: `No, no! It is all wrong. I tell you, please, The words we are using here, and you will find The nearest words in English to say it right.’
So for months...
Nectar
I found my history in the tiny bones of a hummingbird, its beating heart that could fill a thimble with all its blood in seconds, its frantic wings, its soft beak and subtle feet. I found the tongue, its lathed shape, its tucked flesh, and rubbed it between my fingers until it settled like clay, never again to fly sideways or beat its wings faster than a prayer can leave lips.
And for that,...
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Three Peaches on a White Plate
beside the tulips whose fingers, fisted for days, fly open in a sprawl of red-dappled double-jointed wrists and flushed palms. Their purple pistils, velvet nibs with which they will write themselves love poems. In ripening devotion,
the peaches swell their furred cheeks.
Barbara Rockman
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Dependants
How good we are for each other, walking through a land of silence and darkness. You open doors for me, I answer the phone for you.
I play jungle loud. You read with the light on. Beautiful. The curve of your cheekbone, explosive vowels, exact use of cologne.
What are you thinking? I ask in a language of touch unique to us. You tap my palm nothing much. At stations we compete senses,...
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Ninety-five.
Since you left,
I have seen a great blue heron take flight
each day, from the window of the train.
I am still brave, but forgive me,
I could not have anticipated
this space.
Cassandra Warren
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Thinking Stones
Seattle
She said stones are capable of thought. They had to be: any object with sound could think. Something about
the waves trapped inside of rock, memory of time. Something about rock’s metallic viscera. The Japanese
had it right, cultivating a contemplation garden on a bed of sand fluid as blood, each rock electric as a brain, she said.
Dementia brought out the...